I love quotes. I live off of the words of others because often their words say what I am thinking more effectively than my own could do. A few months ago I read Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela, and on December 6, 2013, he died at the age of 95. His contributions were astounding, and I cannot think of a better way to share his memory than to share my favorite quotes from his autobiography. I learned much about being a leader from Mandela; I learned more about the nature of humanity and the world.
“I once asked Mandela to describe his long walk from prison to president. ‘When you’re young and strong,’ he told me, ‘you can stay alive on your hatred. And I did, for many years.’ Then one day after years of imprisonment, physical and emotional abuse, and separation from his family, Mandela said, ‘I realized that they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart. They could not take those things. Those things I still had control over. And I decided not to give them away.'”
“I was angry. And I was afraid, because I had not been free in so long. But as I got closer to the car that would take me away, I realized that when I went through that gate, if I still hated them, they would still have me. I wanted to be free. And so I let it go.”
“To make peace with an enemy one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes one’s partner.”
“The oppressor is also a prisoner of prejudice and narrow-mindedness, and that the same chains bound all South Africans, no matter their skin color.”
“My father, and a few other influential chiefs, had the great respect for education that is often present in those who are uneducated.”
“I learned that to humiliate another person is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. Even as a boy, I defeated my opponents without dishonoring them.”
“Virtue and generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know.”
“I noticed how some speakers rambled and never seemed to get the point. I grasped how other came to the matter at hand directly, and who made a set of arguments succinctly and cogently. I observed how some speakers used emotion and dramatic language, and tried to move the audience with such techniques, while other speakers were sober and even, and shunned emotion.”
“A leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing all along they are being directed from behind.”
“With women I found I could let my hair down and confess to weaknesses and fears I would never reveal to another man.”
“I saw that Reverend Harris had a public face and a private manner that were quite different from one another.”
“I had been taught that to have a BA meant to be a leader, and to be a leader one needed a BA. But in Johannesburg I found that many of the most outstanding leaders had never been to university at all.”
“A degree was not in itself a guarantee of leadership and that it meant nothing unless one went out into the community to prove oneself.”
“What kind of lawyer and leader will you be who cannot speak the language of your own people?”
“Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues.”
“The regent listened to and respected all different opinions.”
“Ndiwelimilambo enamagama. (I have crossed famous rivers). It means that one has traveled a great distance, that one has had wide experience and gained some wisdom from it.”
“The only thing that helped temper my own grief was trying to alleviate hers.”
“Laws stripping people of their rights were inevitably described as laws restoring those rights.”
“It was one of the first times that I saw it was foolhardy to go against the masses of people. It is no use to take an action to which the masses are opposed, for it will then be impossible to enforce.”
“He had committed the cardinal sin of putting his own interests ahead of the organization and the people.”
“The insidious effect of bans was that at a certain point one began to think that the oppressor was not without but within.”
“To overthrow oppression has been sanctioned by humanity and is the highest aspiration of every free man.”
“It is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.”
“It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”
“I wondered- not for the first time- whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one’s own family in order to fight for the welfare of others.”
“To be poor and black was normal, to be poor and white was a tragedy.”
“…reservoirs of cheap labor for the white industry.”
“We each took turns leading the training sessions in order to develop leadership, initiative, and self-confidence.”
“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones – and South Africa treated its imprisoned African citizens like animals.”
“When the women begin to take an active part in the struggle, no power on earth can stop us from achieving freedom in our lifetime.”
“Familiarity, in this case, would not breed contempt, but understanding, and even, eventually, harmony.”
“I looked forward to the chance to speak out before the people attempting to judge me.”
“International public opinion, he said, is sometimes worth more than a fleet of jet fighters.”
“…poor people everywhere are more alike than they are different.”
“Your Worship, with respect, if I had something more to say I would have said it.”
“Men, I think, are not capable of doing nothing, of saying nothing, of not reacting to injustice, of not protesting against oppression, of not striving for the good society and the good life in the ways they see it.”
“But there comes a time, as it came in my life, when a man is denied the right to live a normal life, when he can only live the life of an outlaw because the government has so decreed to use the law to impose a state of outlawry upon him.”
“It was the government that provoked violence by employing violence to meet our nonviolent demands.”
“To men, freedom in their own land is the pinnacle of their ambitions, from which nothing can turn men of conviction aside.”
“I have no doubt that posterity will pronounce that I was innocent and that the criminals that should have been brought before this court are the members of the government.”
“The mind begins to turn in on itself, and one desperately wants something outside of oneself on which to fix one’s attention.”
“Nothing is more dehumanizing than the absence of human companionship.”
“There is nothing so dangerous as a leader making a demand that he knows cannot be achieved. It creates false hope among the people.”
“In confidence we lay our cause before the whole world. Whether we win or whether we die, freedom will rise from Africa like the sun from the morning clouds.”
“As a leader, one must sometimes take actions that are unpopular, or whose results will not be known for years to come. There are victories whose glory lies only in the fact that they are known to those who win them.”
“It was, in that sense, all the same; we fought injustice wherever we found it, no matter how large, or how small, and we fought injustice to preserve our own humanity.”
“As freedom fighters and political prisoners, we had an obligation to improve and strengthen ourselves, and study was one of the few opportunities to do so.”
“Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgement, not till he’s shown his colors, ruling the people, making laws.”
“He listened to anyone but his own inner demons. His inflexibility and blindness ill become a leader, for a leader must temper justice with mercy.”
“…all men, even the most seemingly cold-blooded, have a core of decency, and that if their heart is touched, they are capable of changing. Ultimately, Badenhorst was not evil; his inhumanity had been foisted upon him by an inhuman system. He behaved like a brute because he was rewarded for brutish behavior.”
“These men had little formal education, but a great knowledge of the hardships of the world.”
“A leader must also tend his garden; he, too, plants seeds, and then watches, cultivates, and harvests the result. Like the gardener, a leader must take responsibility for what he cultivates; he must mind his work, try to repel enemies, preserve what can be preserved, and eliminate what cannot succeed.”
“He made his decisions on a visceral understanding of his men and his people. It reminded me once again that to truly lead one’s people one must also truly know them.”
“There are times when a leader can show sorrow in public, and that it will not diminish him in the eyes of his people.”
“It reaffirmed my long-held belief that education was the enemy of prejudice. These were men and women of science, and science had no room for racism.”
“The killing of civilians was a tragic accident, and I felt a profound horror at the death toll. But as disturbed as I was by these casualties, I knew that such accidents were the inevitable consequence of the decision to embark on a military struggle. Human fallibility is always a part of war, and the price for it is always high. It was precisely because we knew that such incidents would occur that our decision to take up arms had been so grave and reluctant. But as Oliver said at the time of the bombing, the armed struggle was imposed upon us by the violence of the Apartheid regime.”
“An oppressive system cannot be reformed, I said, it must be entirely cast aside.”
“He was a man with whom one could disagree and then shake hands.”
“Although I accepted the criticism, I believed that we had no alternative but to proceed on the same course. I knew that I had to be more inclusive, brief more people as to our progress, and I proceeded with that in mind.”
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear myself more times than I can remember, but I hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
“The oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.”
“To be free is not merely to cast of one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
Traveler at the Edge 